Cia

The CIA is probably smug and triumphant about its duplicitous vaccination drive in Abbotabad, a mission hatched to catch and kill Osama bin Laden ("A tainted polio program," Jan. 7). As a doctor, I cringe to think of this unscrupulous use of medicine for murder. While the London Guardian investigated the matter and revealed its unethical intricacies, it is amazing that not one American newspaper thought the CIA's vaccination plot was worthy of further scrutiny. The vaccination drive was against Hepatitis B, a deadly and common disease in the Third World, spread by contaminated needles, surgical instruments and tainted blood.

By Scott Dance and Carrie Wells and The Baltimore Sun | September 30, 2014

A biography of former Baltimore banker Ed Hale is set to detail his rise from a Sparrows Point upbringing to exploits in real estate, sports business and banking - working covertly for the CIA and surviving plane crashes along the way. Apprentice House, a student-run book publisher at Loyola University Maryland, is releasing "Hale Storm," by former Baltimore Sun columnist Kevin Cowherd , on Nov. 1. A preview of the book suggests Hale's story...

Susan Reimer 's column, "Surprising reaction to L'affaire Petraeus," (Nov. 15), brings up a number of salient points, most notably that male readers in large part thought that Gen. David Petraeus took the honorable, necessary course of action, while women who responded pointed out that chief executives of the past often had affairs but managed to carry out their duties. Ms. Reimer sums up her readers' feelings on General Petraeus and his philandering with the following: "With all due respect ... that has nothing to do with my oath of office, and it's none of your business.

"...but we tortured some folks. " -- President Barack Obama, Aug.1, 2014 OK, in the first place: "tortured some folks?" Really? Was there not something annoyingly breezy in the president's phrasing last week as he acknowledged the abuse of suspected terrorists in the wake of Sept. 11? Was there not something off-putting in the folksy familiarity of it? "We tortured some folks. " What's next? "He raped a chick?" "They stabbed a dude?" Granted, it's a relatively minor point.

In the late summer of 1984, the CIA faced what secret documents called the "potential for disaster." Congress was debating a full cutoff of funding for the Reagan administration's covert Contra war in Nicaragua. At that delicate political moment, legal proceedings in a major drug bust in San Francisco threatened to publicly link CIA-Contra operations with cocaine trafficking.A CIA official summed up the Agency's concerns over publicity this way: "What would make better headlines?" The agent, identified only as Ms. Jones, told investigators that the CIA quietly intervened in the case because it could have had an "explosive" impact on the Agency's mission.

Compared to the toppling of Felix Dzerzhinsky's monumental statue outside the KGB building in Moscow last August, the CIA's humiliations during the Robert Gates hearings are more than bearable. They are well-deserved and potentially salutary. If the CIA is to transform itself into an intelligence agency relevant to a world in which the KBG is ostensibly coming in from the cold, the agency at Langley, Va., will have to rid itself of a lot of obsessions, habits, feuds and infighting.Americans were understandably transfixed during the past week's televised Senate hearings in which the CIA's dirty laundry was hung out to dry. It was ostensibly a battle between CIA analysts who accused Mr. Gates of slanting intelligence estimates -- a practice he once described as contrary to "the single deepest ethical and cultural principle of the CIA" -- and those who held he is well qualified to be Director of Central Intelligence.

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted today to declassify portions of its report on the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" to extract information from terrorist detainees, but portions of the work that have been leaked appear to confirm Americans' worst fears about the secret program. Committee investigators found that the brutal treatment of prisoners was far more widespread than the agency has admitted and that CIA officials deliberately misled Congress about the effectiveness of methods that brought shame on the nation and amounted to little more than torture by another name.

The report from the State Department was brief: Thomas M. Jennings Jr., a federal worker from Burtonsville on a temporary assignment with NATO peacekeepers, had died in a car crash in Southern Bosnia. Fifteen years later, it turns out that was only part of the story. Unknown to neighbors and friends, Jennings was working for the CIA, the agency acknowledged last week. A veteran covert officer — he told acquaintances he worked for the State Department — he volunteered to go to Sarajevo after the Bosnian war as a U.S.-led force worked to maintain peace.

Thanks for publishing the report that CIA officer Jonathan Bank was suspended because of his "management style" in the Iran operations division ( "CIA official punished after probe finds he created hostile workplace," March 17). More interesting, Mr. Bank was previously the station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan and "was pulled out" as his name was leaked to the media. Most interesting, "U.S. officials think Pakistan's intelligence service leaked the name in a dispute over CIA drone attacks in the country's tribal belt.

By Scott Dance and Carrie Wells and The Baltimore Sun | September 30, 2014

A biography of former Baltimore banker Ed Hale is set to detail his rise from a Sparrows Point upbringing to exploits in real estate, sports business and banking - working covertly for the CIA and surviving plane crashes along the way. Apprentice House, a student-run book publisher at Loyola University Maryland, is releasing "Hale Storm," by former Baltimore Sun columnist Kevin Cowherd , on Nov. 1. A preview of the book suggests Hale's story...

The Pulitzer Prizes to two news outlets that cooperated with whistleblower Edward Snowden in the disclosure of widespread National Security Agency surveillance of electronic communications at home and abroad has U.S. officialdom in a dither. With the exiled Mr. Snowden harbored in Russia and widely branded at home as a traitor for leaking the voluminous evidence to reporters working for The Washington Post and the U.S. arm of Britain's Guardian newspaper, the Pulitzer committee came down squarely on the side of freedom of the press.

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted today to declassify portions of its report on the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" to extract information from terrorist detainees, but portions of the work that have been leaked appear to confirm Americans' worst fears about the secret program. Committee investigators found that the brutal treatment of prisoners was far more widespread than the agency has admitted and that CIA officials deliberately misled Congress about the effectiveness of methods that brought shame on the nation and amounted to little more than torture by another name.

Thanks for publishing the report that CIA officer Jonathan Bank was suspended because of his "management style" in the Iran operations division ( "CIA official punished after probe finds he created hostile workplace," March 17). More interesting, Mr. Bank was previously the station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan and "was pulled out" as his name was leaked to the media. Most interesting, "U.S. officials think Pakistan's intelligence service leaked the name in a dispute over CIA drone attacks in the country's tribal belt.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long been known as one of the U.S. intelligence community's staunchest defenders. So when an outraged Ms. Feinstein appeared on the Senate floor Tuesday to denounce the CIA and its director, John Brennan, for stealing documents from her committee's computers, spying on its activities and attempting to intimidate committee staffers investigating the agency's treatment of terrorist detainees after the Sept.

When the CIA's chief lawyer, John Rizzo, first came across the term "enhanced interrogation technique" shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he was struck by the phrase's deceptive blandness. The words sounded mild, possibly even salutary. But Rizzo knew they referred to the harshest methods used to elicit information from suspected terrorists in custody, including waterboarding, which mimics the experience of drowning. For Rizzo and others, the "EITs", as they were called, were repugnant but necessary for ensuring the nation's safety.

Fifty years ago, Harry Truman wrote an article in the Washington Post expressing his disappointment over what the Central Intelligence Agency had become. He had established the CIA in 1947 to provide his office with objective information. But it had since "been diverted from its original assignment," Truman wrote, and "become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government ... injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. " He wanted the CIA to be restored to its original intelligence function and asked "that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

Though he did not participate in torture, ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou was the first person to publicly acknowledge the Bush administration's inhumane abuse of detainees ("The truth about torture," April 23). Mr. Kiriakou's disclosures informed the public and encouraged debate that helped pull this country back from a very dark place. But in doing so he drew the ire of the government, which began to harass and intimidate him and his family under both the Bush and Obama administrations, looking for ways to prosecute him. Finally, when Mr. Kiriakou privately shared a colleague's name to a journalist for use as a source, the government seized the opportunity and threw the book at him. Mr. Kiriakou is now serving 30 months in prison.

Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has been elected to the House (or at least that's where we hear he's going). Welcome to your trends report for Monday, May 8, 2013. Sanford will head to Capitol Hill after facing off against Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of the late-night satirist Stephen Colbert. Republicans will hold 233 of the House's 435 seats when Sanford is sworn in, probably this week. Another trip to the House comes today, when former diplomat Gregory Hicks is scheduled to testify about the Benghazi attacks last year.

I have several friends who have given up on "Homeland. " It's true that Season 2 was clunky, overwrought, and loose with many details. We made fun of its many moments of melodramatic dialogue, terrible acting and difficult-to-believe plot twists. Brody's romantic send-off into the woods, in particular, strained my own willingness to suspend disbelief. But I want to tell these friends to come back! Join me! Season 3 has gradually turned up the heat and is now at a rolling boil.

The best scenes of episode seven linger at the Bethesda crime scene, where Javadi killed his ex-wife and daughter-in-law before being taken into CIA custody. There, as Carrie and Quinn face off with local police investigating the horrifically violent double-murder, certain truths about the CIA and civilian life come to light. The route back to the scene of the crime is convoluted. Dar Adal is upset that Quinn, who was initially Adal's protégé, has been working with Saul on an operation Adal knows nothing about.